The significance of 92-year-old Jesse James Jackson receiving a Congressional Gold Medal on Thursday afternoon in Plymouth was not lost on Marine Corps Maj. Sidney Calixte.

Jackson paved a way for the younger Marine more than seven decades ago when he enlisted during World War II and joined a very rare group – the first African-Americans in the Marine Corps.

“It is a surreal feeling. Here is one of the first black Marines who was segregated at Montford Point. Knowing the adversities and challenges they went through is astonishing,” said Calixte, just minutes before Jackson, a resident of Plymouth for the past 29 years, strode into a room where U.S. Rep. William Keating and a crowd of 80 people waited to honor him.

Montford Point was the North Carolina base that the Marines built to keep blacks away from bases where other Marines trained. About 20,000 black Marines trained at the base while it operated from 1942 to 1949.

“For myself, I am just following in their footsteps,” Calixte said. “They definitely are the trailblazers.”

Asked after the ceremony what he thought of Calixte’s appraisal of him, Jackson paused for several seconds and then said, “That’s a good feeling.”

Jackson was decked out in white gloves and a full-dress Marine uniform with his sergeant stripes. He also wore a broad smile as friends and politicians heaped praise upon him.

“This is beautiful,” he said to the crowd. “The best day in my whole life.”

It was also a day that nearly passed Jackson by. An administrative oversight by the military two years ago failed to include him in a 2012 ceremony at the U.S. Capitol where about 400 of Jackson’s fellow Montford Point Marines were given the Congressional Gold Medal.

Keating helped right that wrong, securing the medal for Jackson.

Keating also stressed the role that Jackson and other black Marines played in shifting the American culture at a time when segregation was an accepted part of everyday life in the U.S.

“When he enlisted, racism was a part of our history,” Keating said. “Those were hard days. Railroad tracks separated the whites and African-Americans.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned racially-based employment discrimination by all federal agencies in 1941, and a presidential directive allowed black Americans to serve in the Marines in 1942.

“Jesse came in and changed history, fought a war of freedom for our country under foreign attack and fought a war at home, showing how (blacks) could prosper,” said Keating. “It’s an extreme honor to be in the presence of this man.”

Sitting in the second row was Jackson’s nephew, Michael Holtzclaw, a retired Cambridge firefighter from Roxbury.

Page 2 of 2 - “My uncle has been a role model all my life,” he said. “I would hear the stories about how difficult it was (at Montford Point). Being black men, they had to prove they were up to the task, and they wanted to be accepted.”

Jackson, who dropped out of school after fifth grade and went on to own restaurants and a nightclub in Boston, said he holds no resentment about the hard times and racist treatment he experienced.

“It was a little tough but people are the greatest thing there is, even the segregated ones,” he said.